Five things I’ve learned from eating only wild food for 11 days (and counting).
You don’t realise how much you taste food whilst cooking.
I knew that I tasted food to check levels of seasoning but I had no idea how much until I had to make meals for my children and wasn’t allowed. This has been tricky both physically (I can’t check how the meals I’m feeding everyone else taste) and mentally (it’s very hard not to lick the spoon after dishing out buttery mashed potato, especially when you are hungry and still need to finish cooking your meal).
Your preferences can change REALLY quickly.
Normally I am very much a dry-food person. Apart from a good thick homemade soup (butternut squash or vegetable) I am not a huge fan of covering my meal with lashings of sauces, rendering it all a uniform mushy consistency and taste. No. I prefer to actually taste each ingredient and experience the textures of the different components. This may be a marmite opinion, but a soggy meal is instant ick. Now, the majority of the time with wild food I am strangely finding I prefer the opposite: more dry venison and a few greens? No thank you. Put it in a seasoned broth and I’m much happier. I’m baffled but rolling with it.
“Normal” foods - even homegrown vegetables - are much sweeter than you realise.
It’s not exactly breaking news in the health and wellbeing world that we eat too many sugary refined foods, and as a herbalist who works largely with the gut, I’ve become very aware that as a population our diets are distinctly lacking in bitterness. Now, I like a bitter food, but didn’t realise until I couldn’t have them, how much I often balance out the bitter with a pile of sweeter-than-you-think vegetables - courgette, mange tout, peas, peppers, tomatoes, cucumber… Think about it, they are sweeter than we often notice because we have become accustomed to the taste of sugar. Pick up any pack of food in a supermarket and I’d wager that 90% of the time there’s an alarming sugar content. I’m intrigued to see how these things taste when the wild month is over.
Wild garlic salt makes everything taste better.
No huge explanation needed here. I like garlic. I like salt. Combine delicious WILD garlic with sea salt and there’s little else needed to give your meal a flavour boost. Try it and tell me I’m wrong, I dare you.
Preparation is EVERYTHING.
I thought I was prepared before the start of this Wild Biome month. I was wrong. Yes I’d got some wild meats in the freezer, and some wilted or pureed wild greens as well as various jars of seeds, herbs, powders and so forth, but I hadn’t actually worked out what I was going to do with all these ingredients. Usually I’d add the odd thing to a “normal” meal but I was left in a sort of Ready Steady Cook style scenario (IYKYK) and had to think fast. Those first few days were rough both physically and mentally, but by the first weekend I got my groove and applied my usual meal-planning and shopping list routine to my wild diet. For this second week it has made a huge difference to the ease with which I have been able to follow the diet and feel good doing so.
So as we move steadily toward the half way point of the month, I will be taking these lessons and running with them. My plan over the weekend is again to plan, forage and prepare for the coming week. The nettles that were cut back a few weeks ago just outside are coming up so I’ve got my eye on a massive vat of nettle soup. I also have it on good authority that many large patches of field mushrooms near home have made an appearance after the rain so I’m seeing a lot of fried mushrooms in my future…